Running in Time

From the archive: Racing between our better selves.

Midjourney generation.

Once I ran a trail race in a forest straddling the peninsular ridge that divides the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.

It was one of those California days where the morning fog covers the early hours in a holy stillness. As the temperature rose, the marine layer burned off and sunlight trickled down through the redwood branches. To go running on such a morning is to feel like a Whitman poem, your very atoms singing electric in chorus with the cosmos.

A group of us ran from the starting line, switchbacking up the hillside. Trees lined the trail in disordered bunches, their roots creasing the footpaths in wooden ripples of gnarled burls and fans that sheltered small puddles of moisture dripping off the tree limbs.

The woods smelled ancient and other than human. The ground was sponge-like, a living soil of leaves and compost and bacteria and everything that lets whole biomes arise from underfoot.

I glanced up from my earnest dashing to see a world cast in the cool-hued glow of light passing through chlorophyll. A glimpse of the premodern, as if I had traipsed through the sanctum of some pagan god from a long dead age when the woods were worshipped and virgins sacrificed and elders danced in frenzied fits as moonlight cut through the overgrowth in argentine spotlights.

And then I took a wrong turn.

In a moment of pedestrian groupthink, our front pack missed a turnoff and ran a half mile off track before we realized our error and doubled back. By the time we returned on course, we were behind the entire field. “Well, shit,” I concluded, as we realized the situation.

In moments like this, one has two choices. You can accept that life is often unfair and sometimes shit happens, that you should go along to get along and just enjoy the ride.

Or...

You can remember all those Dylan Thomas poems you read when you were 19, get your dander up, and throw yourself into a lactic mania of quarter-life hubris.

And so I put my head down, muttering “death shall have no dominion,” and accelerated past the other runners. Over the next 19 or 20 odd miles, I slashed over the forest hillsides. Wheezing dark admonitions to run ‘faster, faster’, I managed to get back into the lead and won the race.

Admittedly, it was not a deeply competitive affair. Anyone who would have beaten me also had also made the same wrong turn. Still, it took all my focus to pull back an extra mile on the entire field. I pulled my trucker hat low, blocking out everything from my vision but the four-meter patch of ground before me. Head down, full demon mode as if racing a track 10K.

Midjourney generation.

A few days later, the organizers shared photographs taken during the race. They were stunning.

One showed me climbing up a forested ravine, sunlight bending around fallen logs, tree trunks, and my twisting torso. It looked like someone had scribbled me into a Bierstadt painting.

I stared at the digital photo and had absolutely no recollection of the moment. So focused had I been on my effort, energy, and maintaining pace, I had failed to notice the ravine entirely.

Over the years, I’ve occasionally thought about that race. You’ve probably had similar experiences: focused upon what’s ahead and missing the scenery of the moment as you dash in earnest ambition toward your future goals.

There is, perhaps, no more instrumental use of time than a race.

By “instrumental,” I mean using time as a means to an end. In a race, whether a running race, cycling crit, or tech-company “sprint,” time becomes a resource to be metered out in measured efficiency. Done well, every moment of a race maximizes forward motion. You maintain optimal position relative to your abilities within the field of participants. Ignore that instrumental imperative and your race, at least as success is traditionally defined, will suffer.

You likely began learning this as a child. Don’t be like the hare, Aesop’s fable warns. Do not stop and smell the roses. Do not have a drink with a friend or lay down to enjoy the sunshine on your face before napping under the tree boughs. Be like the tortoise: diligent, head down, steadily sawing forward without pause. Fuck the roses, says Aesop. Go for the win.

AI generation of a tortoise reading Angela Duckworth's Grit.

To embody that ethos in life, though, seems off kilter. In his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that one of the unfortunate side affects of the Industrial Revolution was the hyper-instrumentalization of time—an exclusive focus on the future at the expense of recognizing the now. The cost is that we fail to enrich ourselves in the possibilities of the present moment.

“It turns out to be perilously easy to over invest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the ‘real’ value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.”¹

This is both insightful and startling. For me, someone who has lived their life in a series of training cycles, curriculums, and development plans, such an admonition is a shot across the bow.

To be clear, Burkeman isn’t arguing against the instrumental use of time in all circumstances. Spending time in unenjoyable ways to achieve something that provides you greater meaning is part of what makes us distinctively human. The phrase “human potential” emphasizes the future, that a person’s value can manifest at a later time under the right conditions.

The risk, however, is that we become like I was in that forest cathedral: so transfixed on our objectives for the future that we ignore the wonder of the present.

What then shall we do? Sadly, reader, as you might know, I am not particularly qualified to give advice about a balanced approach toward time.

But I have learned a couple lessons from my cat.

Reggie is a former stray picked up from a wild cat colony at the Oakland Coliseum. Being both semi-feral and very social, Reggie finds human interactions thrilling. He likes to be talked to, pet, and held. He spins around in glee when we toss him a toy. Whenever I walk into our bedroom, Reggie sprints from wherever he was off doing cat things and leaps upon our bed. He promptly rolls onto his back, looking up in earnest, imploring for a belly rub.

I am certain of one thing. There is absolutely no way to instrumentally use the time spent giving a belly rub to a cat. There is no monetary value to be gained. Neither you, nor the cat will be improved in any measurable way. No shareholders will profit. The ROI is nil. Your Peloton ranking will not increase.

And yet, to rub the belly of a friendly, furry mammal is one of the greatest experiences a human can have. I defy you prove otherwise.

Perhaps that is the challenge of our lives. We humans, we deeply flawed and mindful and fragile creatures, flitting upon the planet for a few short years, we must orient ourselves forward in time, even as we try to live in it. And so we exist in tension, caught between belly rubs and the work we lay upon our better selves.

My hunch is that we’d likely be better off if we gave more belly rubs.

Thanks for reading. This was originally published in April of 2023 and has been re-edited and updated.

• Have you ever realized in hindsight that you missed something beautiful because you were so focused on your goal?

• What’s your version of a belly rub moment—something small, unproductive, and purely delightful?

👇 Drop your stories or thoughts in the comments—I’d love to hear them.

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1. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), 125-126.